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I run across the beach, and the people circled around Kirill part as if it’s a movie. Like there is someone yelling cues at them through a megaphone.
Clear the way for the distraught love interest. Three, two, one—heartbreak!
Then the curtain of bodies opens and the scene in front of me is worse than any movie I’ve ever seen. Because it’s achingly, staggeringly real.
“No,” I gasp, dropping to my knees. “No. Ilya, No.”
I say it again and again like maybe Ilya might listen to me. As if I can somehow undo what happened.
“You can’t be out here,” a guard barks. He tries to grab my arm, but I shake him off.
Sonya is standing a few feet away, a hand clamped over her mouth. There are tears in her eyes. If you’d have asked me at the beginning of the night, I would have told you Sonya couldn’t cry. How I wish I still believed that.
I stumble over to her. “Ilya asked me if he could go swimming. He wanted to get in the water, but I told him no.”
“What are you talking about?” she snaps, somehow managing to look annoyed even while she’s crying. “What are you doing here?”
“Ilya wanted to swim, but I told him we couldn’t,” I repeat. “When I took him his dinner, I convinced him to stay inside. He agreed. He told me he wouldn’t come out to the water. His door was locked. I thought he was safe. I told him not to come out here.”
Sonya stares at me for a few seconds, my words sinking in. Then she looks back towards the water. “He didn’t listen.”
A guard shows up, escorting a doctor on some kind of ATV. The doctor is older with white hair and papery skin, but he hops off of the seat and runs across the sand like a man twenty years younger.
“Keep doing compressions,” he tells Kirill. “I’ll get the defibrillator ready.”
He pulls out a black case and begins drying Ilya’s body. He attaches paddles to his lower stomach and one over his heart.
It’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to actually see Ilya.
To recognize that this body in the sand is the same man I know.
To recognize that he isn’t moving or breathing.
That his long limbs are cockeyed in the sand, lifeless and limp.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I mutter, turning away from the scene.
When I look up, I can see the silhouettes of everyone upstairs. For one selfish moment, I think how nice it would be to be up there with them. If I’d come to work for Kirill and remained professional, I could be up there. I never would have grown close to him, I’d have no clue who Ilya is, and I could be inside where it is warm, blissfully unaware of the carnage in front of me.
Instead, I’m here.
Worse, I might be responsible.
“Clear!” the doctor calls.
I turn around to watch. Ilya is now lying alone in the sand, no one touching him.
“Fucking do it,” Kirill growls. “Shock him.”
The doctor shakes his head. “I can’t. The machine isn’t registering a pulse. I can’t shock him without some electrical activity in the—”
Kirill shoves past the doctor and continues compressions. He’s breathing heavily and his shirt is stuck to his chest with sweat, but he’s crazed with grief.
After another excruciating sixty seconds, the doctor checks for signs of rhythm. “Nothing,” he says, dropping his head as he delivers the news. “I’m afraid he’s… he’s gone, Kirill.”
Kirill ignores him and goes into compressions again. It feels like hours pass, though it must only be a minute or two. All I can hear is the crashing of waves and Kirill’s pained grunts.
The doctor checks for a pulse for a third time, but everyone can see it is nothing but a courtesy. A kindness—if it can even be called that—to appease Kirill.
